COMING EAST

Anne Devine, 1992

 

The odometer spun without notice. Mile six thousand of my journey to the Atlantic Ocean occurred unceremoniously somewhere along a quiet two-laner pushing through farmlands and chicken ranches of the coastal Del-Mar-Va region.

I was awash in the headiness of two familiar sensations: the dense sea air enveloped my body, and the smoky voice of a dear friend rolled from my speakers. The Long Island Sound still lay some hundreds of nautical miles to the north, but travelling that last bit of road to the radio station I felt my ebbing quest for solitude dissolve in its finality.

. . . . .

 

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site is just a small ridge of rocks that rise gently out of the New Mexico flatlands before the desert scrub butts up against the Black Mountains. Failing to grace most maps, it is reached from the only marked turnoff as one travels north along farm road number 52, some twenty miles from Tularosa. Continuing beyond the the petroglyphs, the dirt and gravel access road forks off to a BLM campground and ends a few miles east, at another, which sports a trailhead to the Wilderness Area. It is hardly the kind of place one would expect to find much of a crowd or the repeated disturbance of passing vehicular traffic.

I chose this spot more than three months ago while basking in the San Francisco sun under the bay window, during one of those many days I roughed out my trip on the various maps littering the pale green carpet. For the most part we had become experts at completely ignoring one another's presence, but sometimes when I had the maps laid out I knew he was watching my every move. Out of spite, just to prove to him that come April first he'd be there alone with his television and beer, I'd rustle through the crinkly layers of paper until I found some obscure area on one of those maps to scrutinize so that I'd lose myself in the wonder, forgetting even his silent and icy stare. It was one of those times that I came across the tiny writing: Three Rivers Petroglyph Site.

Several groups of heads discreetly turned to follow me as I drove the gravel circle searching the dirt edges for an empty spot. There was one site left, open and exposed in the center of the wide circle, and I claimed it. The ground was splattered with peanut shells and corn chip crumbs and I noticed a couple of sticky and purplish rings stained the tabletop. Shrugging off sneakers for boots, I was more anxious to do some mental cleansing.

But not to the rocks, not yet --- I left the petroglyphs wrapped in mysterious splendor until morning. Instead, I walked the road and crossed flatland to the narrow zig-zag opening in the barbed wire fence. The earth was moist and loamy, though light as peat ... the afternoon thunderstorm had passed through here as well as south at White Sands.

Scanning for unsuspecting rattlers, I stumbled at the glimpse of an exposed shard of pottery. I turned the exquisite fragment over and over again in my hand to admire its detail. No guards or shield of glass kept me from touching these magical pieces of what once was. I buried it in one swift motion, sliding it into the dirt it called home since before the Basketweavers.

The evening walk loosened my limbs and sharpened my hunger.

Quick to realize these people all knew one another, I took in the campsite interactions as I fixed myself a late supper. The tall thin man made it a point to intercept the muddied pickups squished with riders and pulling horse trailers, just as they turned into the campsite. With each episode I watched him gesture boldly, pushing the vehicles away with authority. Cursing this convention of blue hairs toughing it out in seemingly immobile trailers parked in the soft dirt, I jerked a blanket out from behind the carseat to tame my night's bed of jagged rocks the size of silver dollars.

It was the drifting aroma of my after dinner coffee perking that she commented on as she walked closer ... coffee always seemed to draw the strangers in. Mostly she came to warn me of the slide show that would begin after the darkness thickened a bit, of the noisy diesel generator needed to juice the projector. At the sound of my laugh she smiled and invited me. Her name was Helen, leader of the group. Anne, I traded, as I told her I figured as much, but a group of what? In disbelief, I poured her a cup of coffee and we threw some exciting possibilities into the night.

Helen loaned me a lawn chair and we eased around the side of a mobile home to join the art historians assembling for Owen's slide show presentation of his newest research on prehistoric roads. In the dark before the generator rumbled through the air, I was introduced as an artist, a kindered soul, and soon to be fellow rock art cataloger; to ensure that my claim of the center campsite would not interfere with New Mexico Rock Art Society evening tradition, the title of Happy Hour Hostess was bestowed upon me.

Like moths to the light, they flitted to our absurd slide show in the desert; with the first vehicle, in the form of a question, came the explanation. "The sheriff's posse?"

Jay, closest to the gravel drive, pointed towards the road as he strode to the pick-up with a trailer full of horses, "Head east six more miles on the access road, past the fork for the first BLM campground. You want the second campground at the end. That's where the posse's running from."

"Thank you kindly, and pardon our interruption."

"Not at all...we hope you find him soon," Jay raised his eyes and looked directly in the truck, adding, "...and alive."

Recognizing his gestures and this time, hearing his voice, I understood Jay had been shooing traffic to the sheriff's posse all these hours. He told me of the missing boy and of the continuous call for fresh horse and rider teams to fill the rotating sheriff's posse, clarifying the intermittant passes of low-flying helicoptors donated to the search by the Alamogordo television stations and explaining the grid-like search pattern.

I was slipping a bookmark between some half read pages, distracted by humor of the moon rise over a mobile home out the front of my tent, when a car came around for the little boy--blond with a red shirt, they said. I didn't think to ask them what his name is. The three were from the sheriff's posse, the two men with beards, in jeans and boots, and the pale woman. The car, something like a Mach Five, had a loud rumbly engine. Its headlights ripped through the dark, but no one here has seen the little boy. After they left I chain-smoked a few Camels, twisted with the vision of a crumpled and lifeless lump set apart from the dirt by its swatch of red and locks of blond.

Before the heat was up I slipped into my old barn jeans and pumped the white gas stove sixty strokes for a pot of coffee. At the sight of the others gathering, I shouldered my green daypack with the desert essentials and we set out through the mesquite for the east slope.

In teams of two we scoured the twenty foot wide grids originating along the survey staked ridge; snaking down the slope, even the merest scratch was flagged with a numbered marker of red plastic streaming from thin guage wire. A meticulous triple system of measurment, drawing, and then photographic documentation ensured each marked petroglyph/natural mark/modern graffiti was plotted and cataloged accurately.

Burning to climb among the boulders north along the ridge, I broke from the group after lunch. Alone at last with the rocks, I was free to do what felt improper and irreverent in the company of art historians. My hands followed the scars in the baking desert varnish, tracing symbolic images pecked and scraped deep into rock.

Flush from an afternoon of sun, I examined the prickly heat spreading across my hand. The desert burn sprung from within and pushed at my skin. I backtracked as Owen called to me from outside his tent.

"Annie --- the young one's been found, or rather he came in. At nine-o-four this morning he wandered into the other campground, unharmed. Said he wanted to go walking and that he hid from the search parties to spend the night sleeping under a tree, and that if he knew the way, he would have walked all the way to Alamagordo today. Can you imagine? Six years old and thinking like that. Hey, you didn't forget ... almost time for happy hour, " he finished with a low chuckle.

We had that in common, this little boy and me, I thought as I kicked stones on the way back to my tent. I, too, had set out to explore the wildness alone, until I was ready to relinquish the pleasure of my own company and the companionship of the land.

. . . . .

 

I located the radio station with ease, smiling to myself as I swung off the road onto the crunchy surface of sea bleached shells. The familiar voice faded as I switched off the engine. I stepped out onto the mixture of clams and bay scallops, locking the door and pulling the red roped, car key necklace over my head before I turned to the building to make my unannounced visit.